This story of Gilded Age New York City manages to skewer the follies of these fabulously wealthy, yet curiously small minded and provincial characters at the same time that it hints, however obscurely, at the possibility of a more enlightened age to come. It's both a hilarious period piece about Victorian sexual morality and a very timely look into the vacuous lives of the obscenely rich.
Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry the beautiful and conventional May Welland, Newland Archer falls in love with her very unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska. The consequent drama, set in New York during the 1870s, reveals terrifying chasms under the polished surface of upper-class society as the increasingly fraught Archer struggles with conflicting obligations and desires. The first woman to do so, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for this dark comedy of manners which was immediately recognized as one of her greatest achievements.
As I had read Morrison's "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon" before, I knew I was going to have a special experience with "Jazz." And, while the book started slowly for me and I found the characters at first unsympathetic, I was so drawn in by Morrison's skill at delving into people's pain that by the time I was halfway through I was wondering whether this may be my new favorite Morrison novel. Rarely have I encountered a more redemptive arc in a book.
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
I'm not always crazy about alternate history as a genre, but this counterfactual look at the encounter between the Americas and "the Old World" was gripping, thought-provoking, and immersive. I'm a huge fan of Cervantes, El Greco, and Montaigne, and to see all three characters in this book, all of them thrown into a situation totally unlike what happened in Europe in the 1500s, yet all of them acting and reacting in ways that seem totally in character for them, was a great pleasure.
An ambitious and highly entertaining novel of revisionist history from the author of the international bestseller HHhH, Laurent Binet's Civilizations is nothing less than a strangely believable counterfactual history of the modern world, fizzing with ideas about colonization, empire-building, and the eternal human quest for domination. It is an electrifying novel by one of Europe's most exciting writers.
Freydis is a woman warrior and leader of a band of Viking explorers setting out to the south. They meet local tribes, exchange skills, are taken prisoner, and get as far as Panama. But nobody ultimately knows what became of them.
Air Force One meets The Martian—with a dash of Knives Out—in this action-packed sci-fi thriller.
Imperium is the most expensive structure ever created. Once an orbiting laboratory, it is now a space hotel for the fantastically wealthy. But as the station preps for its first group of space tourists, Dr. Chloe Bonilla, Imperium’s resident biophysicist, finds herself questioning whether babysitting a passel of space glampers is worth the distraction from her research.
A private rocket delivers a rogues’ gallery of the world’s elite to Imperium: eccentric billionaires, callow tech bros, a sponsored Instagram influencer, and a seemingly saintly philanthropist. However, posing among the staff are members of a global terrorist group who call themselves the Reckoners, hell bent on upending the economic inequality of twenty-first-century Earth—and they have a bone to pick with these scions of the 1 percent.
As the Reckoners take control of Imperium and demand an $8 billion ransom from their wealthy hostages, it’s up to Dr. Bonilla to save them, and fast. Or the captives will be forced to exit the station—and there’s only one way out.
